Facebook is giving no data love to Yandex, a Russian search engine that launched a social search iOS app today called Wonder. While Wonder lets you ask natural-language queries in a method similar to Facebook’s own Graph Search, the company said the app is not, in fact, a search engine but rather a personal assistant.

The app launched this morning, and according to TechCrunch, it only lasted three hours before Facebook pulled access to its data. The app lets you search across Instagram, Foursquare, Twitter, and earlier in the day, Facebook. You can ask questions like “What are sushi places my friends like?” and it will provide you with a list of restaurants approved by your buddies. The company warned that it was purely experimental and that you’d only be able to ask it questions about places, music, and news at this point.

But Facebook recently released it own search called Graph Search, which does exactly this, only it pulls exclusively from Facebook’s data.

Thinking it could head-off Facebook’s data withholding, the company released a statement saying that it did not consider itself a search engine or directory, therefore it was not in violation of Facebook’s platform policy. Facebook will not let anyone index its data for a directory or search engine without its permission first.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/24/facebook-shuts-down-data-access-for-yandexs-social-search-app/feed/0610206Facebook shuts down data access for Yandex’s social search appYandex releases social search app, tries to dodge future bullets from Facebookhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/01/24/yandex-wonder-facebook/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/24/yandex-wonder-facebook/#respondThu, 24 Jan 2013 21:01:38 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=610050Yandex, a Russian search engine, released a new social search app that lets you ask questions like, "What ice cream shops do my friends like?" But in order to escape any Facebook wrath, the company is claiming the app is a "personal assistant."
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Russian search engine Yandex released its social search app Wonder today — focused entirely on the U.S. market and interestingly timed with Facebook’s own Graph Search Announcement earlier in the month.

Wonder is an iOS app that anyone can use to ask it questions verbally, in natural language. It uses Nuance’s speech-to-text technology in order to facilitate this feature, though it will also let you type out the question if you’re in a place that is too noisy (or you’re too embarrassed to ask it out loud). The app searches across Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and Instagram.

You can ask it questions like “What sandwich shops in New York City do my friends like?” and it will return a list of sandwich shops, with the corresponding names. You can also ask it things like “What news articles have my friends shared?” and it will pull up your friends’ top headlines. Right now, it only supports places, news, and music searches, pulling extra data from sources like Last.fm and Foursquare to give you more data about a place or artist.

The app seems similar to Facebook’s new Graph Search, which doesn’t search any other social networks other than its own. They both focus on discovering things around you through your friends, and the question construction is also very similar.

As TechCrunch notes, the company has provided a legal notice that could head off any aggression from Facebook (such as cutting the company off from its data). Yandex explains that Facebook does not allow anyone to index data for a “search engine or directory.” It argues that Wonder is not a search engine at all, but rather a “personal assistant,” think the iPhone’s Siri.

We have reached out to both Yandex and Facebook and will update upon hearing back.